Thanks for the feedback, guys.
Edit:
In general, his character sheet reads like someone’s masturbation aid.
Not sure what way in which you mean this rather nasty little comment. To respond to one possible interpretation: I had statted Lugh Surehand in a way I thought was "adequately excessive" without going "completely over the top" and a few people responded that they genuinely thought he was "too weak". I really did not want to make that mistake ("too weak") again so it's possible I overcompensated. I can't really respond further without understanding exactly why and how you feel it was "masturbatory".
As for the "Hermetic only cooler tradition" that is heritage stuff from previous appearances of the character that I personally felt obliged to carry over. It's how his tradition is described in both of the classic Harlequin adventures. In hindsight, I wish I had just put "Harlequin resists drain with Willpower + Intuition" as that's the only important distinction from Hermetic.
As for the buttons, that was purely my idea and I thought that the idea that he carries around a bunch of Hot Topic bargain bin buttons attuned into foci at literally random Force would be a good way of converying how powerful and mercurial (for mercurial read: he does not give a shit) the character was and ah fuck it-
It
does seems like rather a small thing for you to be quite so caustic about, though.
To have violated this policy, placing Bull (and crew) as the runners involved in Harlequin's Back, and having an unnamed someone be the 'last survivor' of the crew that did Harlequin is ...
Look, the reason why the policy existed was to be able to place into Published Adventure your own characters. "I did that run." The identities of the people who performed a published run were never, ever identified, because who knows who it was? Maybe the results of the run were chosen and placed into canon, but the cast was specifically left blank, so that every single GM and every single player could put their gaming group, or their characters, into that slot.
I want to be clear here. I am aware of and I support the long-standing policy you're referring to, and I did not intend to countermand or subvert it. I like to think that if I had really come close to doing so, I would have been stopped by the firm hand of the editorial infrastructure. So how do I feel that I did NOT do that? Well...
The most important thing to remember is that this entire discussion occurs in the context of unreliable narrators who are professional criminals, unconfirmed third-party evidence, rumors, and hearsay. It is not meant to state that anyone's PC(s) did not canonically participate in Harlequin or Harlequin's Back; that would not be my place. There are people who PC'd in those adventures before I was old enough to go to kindergarten, after all.
The events that Bull is described as being a part of are not necessarily those of Harlequin's Back--there are similarities, but certainly Bull's account is not a blow-by-blow description of Harlequin's Back.
Relatedly, the UNNAMED PC from Harlequin is A) Unnamed and B)
Possibly the last surviving member of that team. Neither of those filters should exclude the open-ended class of "your PC". At least what I can say in all earnestness is that they were not meant to.
So in the first place, that was not necessarily meant to be Harlequin's Back and in the second instance, the description of the source of the information and his status is so deliberately vague that it really ought not to exclude anyone's PCs. What I was going for was the heightened level of vagary employed by certain video-game franchises with heavily customized characters when they refer to the protagonist of the previous game (like for instance the way that later Elder Scrolls games refer to the Nerevarine who could have been of any race, class, and gender, for instance).
I naively thought that seeing that "possibly the last surviving member" line might make people who PC'd Harlequin back in the olden days wonder about how their PCs are doing at surviving to whatever ripe old age they're at in 2073, which I thought would be a pleasant thing to muse on.